Last night I was edging the lawn while Rylee was mowing.  I was doing lots of thinking while doing this.  I was admiring all the neighbor's lawns.   One lawn care company seems to have the monopoly on this street.  They come in once a week and do 75% of the street in an afternoon.  I was wondering if we should hire that company to do ours too. I was then brought back to a story from a lesson in the Marriage and Family relations class. 

Elder Loren C. Dunn of the Seventy relates, “While we were growing up in a small community, my father saw the need for my brother and me to learn the principle of work. As a result, he put us to work on a small farm on the edge of town where he had been raised. He ran the local newspaper, so he could not spend much time with us except early in the morning and in the evening. That was quite a responsibility for two young teenagers, and sometimes we made mistakes.

“Our small farm was surrounded by other farms, and one of the farmers went in to see my father one day to tell him the things he thought we were doing wrong. My father listened to him carefully and then said, ‘Jim, you don’t understand. You see, I’m raising boys and not cows.’ After my father’s death, Jim told us his story. How grateful I was for a father who decided to raise boys, and not cows. In spite of the mistakes, we learned how to work on that little farm, and I guess, although they didn’t say it in so many words, we always knew we were more important to Mother and Father than the cows or, for that matter, anything else”

I guess the Lord was reminding me that there are more important things in the world than having the world’s greenest, prettiest, most pristine lawn in the world.   Rylee and I got to spend some great time together caring for the yard.  She is learning the value of work and is able to see the reward of a job well done.  I'm raising girls, not beautiful lawns.